Eric Brown was born and raised in California. He joined the U.S. Navy at 17 and became a Preventive Medicine Technician. Upon exiting military service, he left the medical field behind and moved to Nebraska and entered college to study art and design, which resulted in a Bachelor's of Science in Graphic Design from Wayne State College in Nebraska. Eric has since branched out by teaching himself (or learning from others) various aspects of HTML, CSS, and PHP as well as a variety of other coding languages and web marketing strategies and tools. He currently owns his own media business located in Manhattan, KS, where he lives with his wife and pets.
Over the years Eric has worked for a local design and development firm in Nebraska on such projects as the Golden Spike Tower website aimed at tourist traffic centered on the Union Pacific's Bailey Yard and with a premier pet industry design and development firm as a project manager. He has also written for such prestigious publications as Trafficology (a purchased print publication on web marketing read by over 80,000 people world-wide), CMSWire.com (a leader in content management news), ReveNews (a highly rated site on various aspects of marketing), and Gadgetell (a well-known gadget news site).
Eric was a reviewer for Joomla! 1.5 JavaScript jQuery by Packt Publishing. He has also been involved in other books as well providing editing, image touch-up, and custom hand-drawn maps for Tagging Along (a Neville Family retrospective) and editing, layout, cover art, and image touch-up on My Life and Community (Biography of Ken Huebner).
Mark Kielar brings over 25 years of experience in design, photography, commercial art, analysis, and computing to his understanding of open source content management systems such as Joomla! 1.6. He has applied his expertise in web design and development, writing, and editing to projects for organizations as diverse as the Oakland California Charter Schools and Mark Brand Architecture. Mark currently operates his own web design and content management business, Sparkling Finish, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Rita Lewis has been creating and managing the content of websites for small businesses and creative organizations for the past 20 years working under the name, Words To Web, Inc. During that time she has created and managed Joomla! sites for independent movies for Shayanne Productions and non-profits such as the Interfaith Community Against Domestic Violence. Rita is a regular blogger on Freelance Switch as well as the author of 15 books on Macintosh computing and the Internet, including titles for O'Reilly & Associates, Peachpit Press, and SAMs. Rita has been awarded by the Computer Book Club and The Society For Technical Communications for her efforts.
Peter Martin has a keen interest in computers, programming, sharing knowledge, and how people (mis)use information technology. He has a Bachelor's degree in Economics (International Marketing Management) and a Master's degree in Mass Communication. He discovered PHP/MySQL in 2003 and Joomla!'s predecessor, Mambo CMS, a year later. Peter has his own business http://www.db8.nl (founded in 2005) and he supports companies and organizations with Joomla! and Joomla! extension development.
Peter is actively involved in the Joomla! community where he is a member of the Community Leadership Team and Global Moderator at the Joomla! forum.
His other interests are open source software, Ubuntu Linux, Arduino, music (collecting vinyl records), and art house movies. Peter lives in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Oleg Nesterov is a professional web developer. He holds a Master's degree in Mechanics and Mathematics (diploma with honors) from Sumy State University in Ukraine. Since graduation, he has figured out the three main principles for his life: having a mission, loving what you do, and constant self-development. He tries to follow each of these principles in his life and job. That's why he's a web developer.
Oleg runs MindK (http://www.mindk.com), a web development company that focuses on producing custom Joomla! extensions, templates, and websites of the highest quality. He is an active member of the Joomla! community and speaker at international Joomla! conferences.
He enjoys sharing his experience with others, teaching people, and creating tools that increase developers' productivity.
You can find more about Oleg on his personal website: http://onesterov.com.